How NOT 2 Skydive - Soft link break tests!

Hi, I'm a skydiver. I want to know how strong these soft links are. The reason I want to know is because these are the only things that are holding me to my canopy. We're going to break test them on this episode of how not to skydive. Hi, my name is Eric and I swung by Ryan's lab here and this is where these go and yeah these are pretty tiny. Cool, so explain to starting with what is this the container the backpack container yep and it goes through uh what are called the three rings so you've got one ring it's just a basic lever and it goes to these risers and then the risers physically touch these and your entire line group goes through this and that happens four times and what is this black stuff uh coban yeah essentially sacrifices itself so these don't get worn out cool is that just the stuff they wrap around your ankle when it's sprained yep or what your dog when they go to the vet and get an iv yep same stuff okay so this wears out so you don't wear out your you can your soft one pretty much see right there what kind of um material is this is vectran okay and this comes that is a liquid crystal polymer liquid crystals that reminds me of stuff well what other materials do the lines come in they come in spectra which is called micro line they come in hma which is high modulus aramid and they come in dacron wow yeah like yeah can't wait to break test all that so the first skydive break test we're going to do is the canopy to the lines and how they're connected and what are the other ways that people connect these they use mullions okay those are quick links yep quick links and why do some people choose one over the other yeah so people choose mullions because they are made out of stainless steel and they're strong but they are not always field serviceable so but these are these are always field serviceable so the question is which one is better what does field serviceable mean uh i can take these off and change canopies at any time without any tools okay whereas quick links if they get too tight they're not as quick as they sound correct let's examine these pull one out for me do you double wrap them no they're oh oh yes you do make a double wrap okay double wrap and then is that girth hitch what's that it's not that's not a button knot it's girth hitched yeah around the little guy this little tabby thing in highlining we call that inverted hi i'm ryan and i'm not a skydiver at least that's what i tell my mother i love soft shackles and i find them fascinating when they kind of like are in other sports and so this doesn't really seem like a soft shackle because it doesn't have a button knot or any other knot what's keeping this from coming over the top is this green tab and so what they do is they double wrap which is a trick i actually want to try for connecting uh so in loop to so in loop is use a four millimeter soft shackle instead of five because the button knot is smaller and that way we can tuck that button knot inside of the sewing loop but to use the smaller size i've got a double wrap so this is a super interesting test to me because we're gonna got four of them here to test you can see here that this goes through there and pull it off of the green tab and then it went through itself so in highlighting we call that inverted and then it's just double wrapped through the riser lines and it looks like it's just an eye to an eye you can see here that it has stitching that keeps the splice from coming undone even though this kind of material usually holds itself with like that finger trap technology so double wrap and so we're going to test it double wrapped single wrapped and oh nope i'm doing it wrong i'm already gonna i should not skydive wow the little things that'll kill you okay there's that let's find out if we can get anything in here strong enough to break test that little tiny eye we are now going to go over to the lab which is here and if you stay until the end we'll break test an extra thing so let's go welcome to tomorrow wasn't interested in breaking stuff last night but eric came back and label out buds so we get sponsored and uh so yeah we're going to break this stuff down let me give you a very quick tour of my super messy lab this isn't me trying to decorate that's all the bolt buster tests i haven't gotten to and these are all very special memories and if you want to know what this is for example maybe we can make a video about that leave that in the comment section this is a rectangle this is a bar that's a slack line holding a hydraulic and this hydraulic held back from recoil from part with paracord is going to and then goes to this big fat load cell to my original load cell because it was all kind of integrated into the system so now it's kind of like married into it but we're going to test um these in all sorts of ways maybe the way you're not supposed to because that that would be interesting this was super hard by the way to get that around the two quick links now that we pulled it a little it you have a little space but this is to catch the samples so things don't go flying and uh here we're gonna have some line scale threes coming got some dc power so the lights don't flicker when we get some slow-mo going and then we've got our fancy graphs and here's our lodestar sensor 10 000 hertz which you do not need for slow pull tests but uh it's my favorite load cell at the moment so that's what we're using in its grape season so what do you think it's going to break at i'm guessing uh 3 500 pounds that's how i feel comfortable using them that's what i think that's what you're hoping that's what i'm hoping they break at least all right you guys put in the comments below what you think let's do it so where'd it go uh good question um see it fly did it disintegrate i mean could this oh here we go so this is spectra interesting it didn't slip off it broke cool so check out that graph i love graphs do you know what 10.9 kilonewtons is it's a lot yeah it's 2000 ish pounds 8.8 is 2000 pounds okay yeah okay so would you whip uh i think so still actually now that i think about it because there's four of those yeah so plus your body i think breaks at seven yep there you go so cool um how should we break the next one the sketchy way the sketchy way all right so i'm gonna wrap this twice and basically guys you're supposed to for educational purposes go through the hole here and then over the green tab so let me show you how to do this right so we supposedly save lives while encouraging people to do risky activities oh my gosh this is so hard is this wrong i know you're right a lot of times what people do is they will pass they'll pass this one of the line they'll imagine this is one line set yeah then they'll do this is how they set these up incorrectly 90 of the time oh oh that's how they set it up incorrectly so they don't mess up the connection necessarily but they mess that up that's what should we test this that would be amazing to test okay let's test that because that's a mistake we normally because that is the real life example that you see yeah because you're supposed to go through that hole and then over the green tab because now it's like half of it yeah it's strong yeah that's it's a weird one okay now what's interesting is how difficult you might have to time lapse this because it's so freaking long of a video oh look there you are okay in real world that's the mistake in real world well good thing you're here to show us how not to do it okay let's connect this back up here and pull it that's oh wow it broke huh that's less than i thought 6.2 or that's more than i thought it would be but that's cool what do you think i think it's uh oh it's hard it's stiff yeah from breaking interesting yeah uh it's less than 10 kilonewtons but it's technically strong enough you think so i mean i had four of those okay mostly evenly distributed yeah you you don't want to see 24 kilonewtons on your harness this would be bad let's break it straight just without being double wrapped yeah 15 seconds so we're oh yeah i don't need it so let me guess five kilonewtons oh you were so close oh was i right 6.5 okay i thought it'd be less than our last test yeah that's uh that's cool okay yeah these graphs are real simple they just go up there's no real crazy i think it's called deflection point i actually don't know the terminology yet but yeah 6.6 is the same when you do it wrong versus if you just single wrapped it yeah because literally you're single wrapping it on the one but it didn't come off it actually broke so that's that's amazing what time so like you double wrap this because i see you guys double wrap a lot of things the it's not twice the it's not twice it's not twice no it's not twice the strength it's never just that linear all right let's just pull eye to eye now sorry i'm so confused right now like what why are you confused because what what i thought was going to happen did not happen at all that's that's what slack snap's all about what all right so first of all nailed it three and a half was my guess so let me explain the logic of my three and a half kilonewton guess is this was pulled straight in good splices with stitching with good bend radiuses on our quick links so best case scenario as soon as we wrap it you're technically going to get doubled but the problem is you end up doing this weird girth hitch around it which has a tight bend radius and any of this high techy cord stuff in this case spectra it doesn't like to take the bends very well before it starts to break the outer fibers because they're stressed more than the inner fibers and so that's why all of our samples broke here on the other tests because they were all girth hitched around this really weird green tab i'm not used to so when you go from 10 kilonewtons to 6 you're going to get more of like the best case scenario rather than a double wrapped worst case scenario anyways even three and a half kilonewtons probably would hold you so this is very interesting i'm sure this kind of wigs people out and makes them concerned like that it's not safe uh the alternative i think is the malleons or quick links and if you pull them pretty tight especially the tiny ones they're going to be quite difficult to unscrew without a wrench which means you can't service them in the field aka when you're in the field of the skydiving place but uh don't you guys have wrenches in the shop sometimes i mean if you're base jumping you i don't know i don't know how many people base jump with these or base jump with wrenches yeah you guys base jump with sos things right yeah there you go that's right it's all you need yeah it's just a garment so speaking of bend radiuses you're not supposed to tie knots in dyneema because it reduces the strength a lot well what happens if you tie bigger knots giving a bigger bend radius well the load strand here is still inside of this thing right there it's on the inside so technically the bend of this is actually pretty tight even though your brain says it's a big fat knot so i'm kind of curious about this because we may or may not have done this style on the sweden world record project you're not supposed to do this but we broke a lot of rules there so let's pull this as a bonus test and then we'll call it good this is why i have to have 20 seconds right that was interesting yeah okay what was interesting about that just the fact that it didn't snap all at once so this is 12 braid and it and it always will break 11 interesting and then and then it eventually breaks the last one but yeah it's uh it it broke where it broke in this knot yeah so you can see inside of that one right where it gets pinched and bends the most is where it breaks um peak force 9.5 kilonewtons and this is interesting how it went up and then you can see kind of what happened there and then how it bounces around while that last strand is going and this is one kilonewton that line there so yeah we'll have non-reflective graphs later you guys so that held less weight than these did double wrapped yeah wow okay my conclusions from all of this are that riggers get really mad when they find uh incorrectly installed soft links but what i'm realizing is that we're all going to live anyway so yeah they seem to be strong enough or good enough i guess or that's not going to be the cause of that's not going to be the cause of someone uh you know going in because they installed their soft links incorrectly yeah it'd be a good idea if they did it right but it seems to be super good enough well maybe we can all just if we're gonna live anyways be nicer to each other absolutely and hopefully if you uh smash the like button he'll make more how not to skydive videos well apparently skydiving is safer than my mom thought let's just uh let's go give it a try